Physicist recruited to University of Houston by his idol

Materials scientist Zhifeng Ren is researching ways to capture heat lost during the production and use of energy.

Photo: Eric Kayne

A quarter of a century ago, Zhifeng Ren was a graduate student in China studying physics when Houston's Paul Chu made his historic superconductivity discovery.

Ren was so taken by Chu's discovery of materials that acted as superconductors at a relatively high temperature that he began studying similar chemical compounds. Superconductors are materials that carry energy without any loss due to resistance.

After moving to the United States in 1990, Ren said he would occasionally rub shoulders with Chu at scientific meetings.

"I got to know Chu personally, a little bit, but not so well. He was a top scientist, and I was just a little guy," Ren said.

Promising researcher

But all the while, Ren was steadily building a successful scientific career of his own, not just in superconductivity but also nanotechnology and clean energy.

Then, in 2011 when Chu gave a keynote talk at Boston College on his high-temperature superconductivity discovery, Ren, a professor there, took the opportunity to meet with Chu - Chu was also interested in Ren. So began the process of recruiting Ren to the University of Houston.

"Zhifeng is a scientist, a teacher, entrepreneur and a humanist, the ideal embodiment of a faculty member of UH, which I was striving to help reach a new horizon," said Chu, founding director of the Texas Center for Superconductivity at the University of Houston. "He is bright, energetic, creative and hardworking, with a strong sense of social responsibility."

Ren arrived at the University of Houston at the beginning of this year, bringing his lab with him and working in a number of areas, including waste-heat recovery.

It appears to have been a smart hire: This month, Ren received an Edith and Peter O'Donnell Award in Science from The Academy of Medicine, Engineering & Science of Texas, which recognizes the state's most promising researchers.

Thermoelectrics

Ren is a materials scientist, which means he seeks to understand how materials built atom by atom can be carefully designed to perform powerful new tasks.

One of the areas in which he is most interested is thermoelectrics, specifically designing new materials that can capture heat lost during the production and use of energy.

A gasoline engine in an automobile, for example, wastes about 75 percent of the energy created by burning gas. This heat, some of which comes out of tailpipes, is simply lost. Ren's lab is creating nontoxic materials that can capture this heat and use it to, say, power a car's electronics.

Similar devices also could potentially increase the efficiency of power plants by as much as 10 percent.